The Marrowbone Marble Company
A powerful novel of love and war, righteousness and redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit.
1941. Orphan Loyal Ledford lives a very ordinary life in Huntington, West Virginia. By day a History major, by night a glass-blower at the Mann Glass factory where he courts the boss’s daughter Rachel. Preferring to read rather than talk about the war raging in Europe, he focuses his mind upon work and study. However when Pearl Harbour is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets his life on a new course.
Upon his return from service in the war, Ledford starts a family with Rachel, but he chafes under the authority at Mann Glass. He is a lost man, unconnected from the present and haunted by the memories of war, until he meets his cousins the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to Ledford, and it is there, with help from an unlikely bunch, that The Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory town becomes a vanguard of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty, a home for those intent on change. Such a home inevitably invites trouble, and Ledford must not only fight for his family but also the community he has worked so tirelessly to forge.
Returning to the West Virginia territory of the critically acclaimed The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, M. Glenn Taylor recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community. A beautifully-written and evocative novel in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy and John Irving, The Marrowbone Marble Company takes a harrowing look at the issues of race and class throughout the tumultuous 1950s and 60s.
”'Taylor really is in that long American tradition that starts with Mark Twain and finds its character, meaning and moral force in the extraordinariness of ordinary people.” - TIME OUT
”'a mesmerizing storyteller…Taylor has created a remarkably complex, soulful, and provocative historical novel righteous in its perspective on America’s struggle to live up to its core beliefs.” - BOOKLIST
“He writes with the elemental force of a latterday John Steinbeck.' CANBERRA TIMES -
”'This novel confirms the view that he is a major and original talent.” - SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
”'Splendidly Norman Rockwell-ish…It’s like watching an idealistic old movie made in pre-McCarthy Hollywood.” - THE TIMES
”'Marrowbone throbs with muscular Hemingway sentences, consciously biblical cadences, a plethora of imagery where almost every mundane event holds a major and marvellous message.” - WEEKEND HERALD